1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a playback apparatus, a playback method, and a playback program, and can be suitably applied, for example, to playing back content data.
2. Related Art
In recent years, record players being equipped with a recording medium such as a hard disk or a flash memory to play back content data stored in the recording medium were widely spread. In such a type of record player, the amount of recordable content data has drastically increased with the increase in size of the recording medium and the advancement of data compressing techniques.
Actually, a record player equipped with a flash memory having a memory capacity of several giga bytes can store several hundreds to several thousands of songs of music data, with each song being several mega bytes in size.
As the amount of content data which can be stored in the record player increases, it is more difficult for a user to search for desired content data, thereby deteriorating the searching ability.
Therefore, in the known record player, for example, searching for desired content data is made easy by classifying the content data into plural groups depending on attributes thereof and switching a search range to search for a group and then to search for content data in the group.
The music data attributes include genres, album titles, and artist names, for example.
As an operation device for performing a search operation while switching the search range, a record player having a rotational operation unit capable of being pushed in and rotated was suggested (for example, see JP-A-2003-84902).
In such a record player, a desired album title can be searched for by performing a pushing operation and a rotating operation of the rotational operation unit and then music data grouped into an album title can be played back and the like.